Fisk just wanted to finish his beer and get out of there now. “No,” he said. “Appreciate the offer.”

CHAPTER 9

Fisk walked ten blocks with his phone in his hand. He had Dr. Flaherty’s number, or at least her answering service. She had told him many times to call if ever he needed counseling, and he had never taken her up on it, never even come close. This didn’t feel like a crisis necessarily, but at least something he should raise with her.

Did I do the right thing?

But hitting Send, connecting that call, was a line he was loath to cross. And why did he need her to tell him what was right and what was not? And she wouldn’t decide that for him anyway, she would insist that he answer his own question, which was what he was doing right now.

What would you hope to gain from sitting with Jenssen?

So the therapy had indeed been a success: Dr. Flaherty had taken up residence inside his own head.

So had the booze. What was he really doing here? He was calling her to tell her what he had done. He was calling to say, I am fine. I did the right thing.

He was calling for her approval. He was acting for the therapist in his head. He was doing what he thought she would want him to do, what he thought would please her.

Fisk stopped in the middle of crossing the street.

What would please Krina Gersten?

Hers was the only voice he needed to satisfy.

The voice Jenssen had silenced.

The car horns came into his consciousness only gradually. Drivers yelling at him to get out of the way, calling him a drunk.

He was not drunk. He reached the curb and looked at his hand, the one holding the phone.

The phone screen was still and readable.

His hand was not trembling. His mind was clear.

He knew what he was going to do.

He dug into his pocket for Link’s card, cleared Dr. Flaherty’s number, and started dialing.

CHAPTER 10

July 23

Nacimiento de los Negros, Mexico

Nacimiento de los Negros meant Birthplace of Darkness. “One hell of a name for a village,” said MacClesh.

The little town was situated several miles off State Road 20, a loop of empty highway circling around a desolate upwelling of mountains that had no name on Cecilia Garza’s map. It was a road that led, in essence, to nowhere—the country dry, stony, empty.

“You’re too poetic,” said Cecilia Garza, seated next to him. “The village was founded by a group of escaped slaves from the United States. They came here about one hundred and fifty years ago. The people here still consider themselves to be black.”

Four Policía Federal vehicles pulled into the center of the town, stopping in a cloud of dust. Everyone piled out. The center of town—such as it was—consisted of a few open-air stores, a stucco church, and several acres of packed, weedy dirt surrounding a statue of the Virgin. The pedestal on which the Virgin stood was badly cracked and canted forward a little, so that even the Virgin looked as though she were preparing to break into a run.

Two dozen people in the streets surrounding the square all stopped. Men wearing cowboy hats and boots, women carrying string bags full of dried beans and rice and meat wrapped in bleeding butcher’s paper. They all stared apprehensively. But unlike the Virgin, they showed no impulse to flee.

Garza watched MacClesh walk around the square, his thumbs in his belt. He sized up each of the citizens, then approached perhaps the oldest man, hatless, his skin darkened by the sun. He had a weather-beaten face, curly hair, and what at first looked like a sizable facial tumor but was in fact a large plug of chewing tobacco lodged inside his left cheek.

MacClesh looked at the old man. “Those are some very fine boots, señor.”

The old man looked down at them as though he didn’t realize he had them on.

MacClesh said, “I am ashamed to compare them to my own.”

MacClesh showed him his—and the old man flinched, as though he thought he was about to be kicked.

MacClesh smiled at the old man. He stepped closer to him—almost close enough to touch his forehead with the brim of his hat.

“You know why we’re here,” said MacClesh.

The old man spit tobacco juice on the ground between the toes of his fine boots, but did not answer.

MacClesh smiled again, then stepped back. This left enough room between them for another of Garza’s men to step up and punch the old man in the stomach.

It wasn’t a hard punch, out of respect for the man’s age. But it was more than enough to double him over.

The old man dropped to his knees, bending forward until his forehead touched the dusty ground.

Garza preferred to let her men operate without her direct instructions. She did not like to be the mother hen. Nor did she care for their predilection toward casual violence. But it was a part of the macho culture of the PF, and Garza had to be judicious about interfering with it. So when she stepped in here, she did so not with the appearance of ending the violence, but of capitalizing on it.

“Pick him up,” she said.

Two men grabbed him, one at each armpit, and hoisted him to his feet. His face was empty, though he was gasping for breath. The lump in his cheek was gone. A string of amber saliva stretched across his dark chin, in contrast to the powdery oval of white dust on his forehead.

The brown plug of tobacco lay in the dirt. Next to it, a device that had fallen out of the old man’s pocket. It was a cell phone.

“His phone, please,” said Garza.

Garza stood before the man. She did not smile, she did not play the “good cop.” She did not indulge any of her femininity. She was not soft. This was about finding and stopping a violent murderer.

One of her men placed the old man’s phone into Garza’s hand.

“There are no secrets in this world, señor,” she said to the old man.

The old man’s eyes, damp from the force of the punch, looked off toward the Virgin.

“There are satellites in the sky, airplanes with cameras, helicopters, radar. Even these . . .” She waggled the man’s cell phone in the air in front of his face. She brushed off the whitish dust. It was the latest model, immaculate, much nicer than the phone she carried. “We track the radio waves that come out of them. You, me, Major MacClesh—all of us—we have American machines that tell our exact locations right down to the millimeter.”

The old man looked mutely at the phone as though he had never seen one before.

“Please take no offense when I say this,” Garza said. “But your town . . . it is a miserable shithole.”

The old man grunted. He agreed with her.

“And yet, look!” She pointed to the one modern feature of the village, just visible past the steeple of the church: a huge galvanized steel tower that loomed over the town. “Your village has its very own cell tower. And a simple farmer such as yourself has the very latest phone in his pocket. And those trucks parked over there by those stores? Very nice trucks. Even my men can’t afford such nice trucks.”

The old man shifted from one boot to the other, looked sadly at his plug of tobacco staining the ground in front of him.

“What do you grow on your farm?” Garza inquired. “These phones? Those boots?” She stepped back, taking in the old man’s boots, smiling brightly. “Here we are in the very birthplace of darkness, at the ass end of the earth. And a simple farmer—and I mean no disrespect—but a simple farmer walks the town wearing beautiful new boots.” Garza made a long, slow sweep of the town with her arm. “Señor, I see no factories here. I see no mines. I see no groves of fruit trees. In fact, I must tell you, the fields as we were driving into this town . . . they did not seem well tended. Not at all.”